The use of adaptive bitrate streaming to deliver content items to client devices continues to grow. While the use of adaptive bitrate streaming to deliver content items to client devices generally tends to provide improved quality-of-experience (QoE) for users of the client devices, existing adaptive bitrate streaming techniques may still result in insufficient QoE for users of the client devices under certain conditions. Additionally, existing adaptive bitrate streaming techniques also may result in insufficient spectral efficiency where adaptive bitrate streaming is used for transmissions over the air interface in wireless communication networks.